Mapping

The tagging mailing list has been very busy recently. The voting for four proposals has been started.

The key crossing:island=* is intended to indicate the existence of a pedestrian island at a road crossing.

The keys prepaid_top_up=*, prepaid_top_up:brand=* and prepaid_top_up:network=* can help in finding a location where you can buy a top-up card for your phone.

If you want to specify whether a power line is insulated, you might be interested in the optional key insulated=yes/no.

If there is a railway on a highway and this space is shared with vehicles, the new tag embedded_rails= will allow you to tag the highway, although the rails are mapped as separate ways.

One question that is regularly asked is the difference between waterway=ditch and waterway=drain. Eugene Podshivalov asked this question on the tagging mailing list and it became apparent that there is not yet consensus on the differences.

The city of Cologne, Germany, released (automatic translation) its recent aerial images under a CC0 license and offers WMS services that can be used with OSM editors.

Konrad Lischka shows how to query for selected information from OpenStreetMap with the Overpass API and how to visualise it with uMap using churches and church service times as examples (automatic translation).

Christoph Hormann continues his ironic recommendations on how to map for the renderer, specifically how to render arbitrary text.

Community

Ben Abelshausen is advertising for Open Belgium 2019, a conference that will take place on March 4th in Brussels. In his mail he invites everyone to submit a talk and announces the availability of early bird tickets. He is also promising to organise a community day later this year.

Martijn van Exel announced the release of a new MapRoulette version. Version 3.1.2 is now available in Japanese too. It allows you to share filtered result lists with others and to edit just the current object in JOSM in areas with a lot of data unrelated to the task at hand.

The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB Lab) features an article from Carlos Bajo where he explains how OpenStreetMap contributes to societal development in places where the government fails to provide basic services. He highlights the growing number of local contributions in Africa and the benefits of Open Data and OSM in particular.

A discussion in the German forum (translation) asks whether Mapbox are “taking over tagging sovereignty in OSM”.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Guillaume Rischard announced that the new Organised Editing Guidelines have come into effect. The guidelines cover “edits that involve more than one person and can be grouped under one or more sizeable, substantial, coordinated editing initiatives.”

derFred points to the possibility of becoming a member of the OSMF without the regular membership fee of 15 GBP if you cannot afford membership due to economic reasons. If you are an active mapper you can apply for the Fee Waiver Program. You can also apply if there is no payment option for the membership fee available for you (automatic translation).

Events

Humanitarian OSM

Pete Masters thanks HOT Tanzania for helping a hospital in Tanzania to implement a patient origin tracking system by mapping the surroundings and training of the hospital staff. The system is intended to help the hospital locate the source of a disease and it is hoped that it might help to prevent the spreading of diseases and infections too, according to the website ippmedia.com’s reports.

Janet Chapman posted a review of 2018 for Crowd2Map, an initiative aiming to map Tanzania, in her user diary. She mentions the invitation to organise a mapathon at the UN, the award the organisation received at the last State of the Map in Milan and some of the talks she held during the year. Further information can be found on Crowd2Map’s website.

Education

The new curriculum (pdf) for French high schools states that all students should be introduced to geospatial data usage. One of the expected abilities in that domain is the ability to “contribute to OpenStreetMap in a collaborative way”.

Maps

[1] The website openstreetbrowser.org received an update that makes more detailed filtering for buildings available and now includes filters by building attributes such as type, age or height. The new map version also introduced office tags in thematic maps and provides more detailed popups in the Culture categories.

switch2OSM

A short tweet about an event in the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey, the national British mapping agency, about “Road Flows” led Richard Fairhurst to ask for more details. The event was about using OpenStreetMap for improving data quality. In addition, the answer revealed that the Ordnance Survey searches for road direction mismatches between their own and OSM data and then sends surveyors to verify if required.

Software

Many software projects use the fork and pull model approach for contributions. alexkemp explained the basics of this model in his OSM user diary after he faced this requirement for the first time when he wanted to update a Github-hosted project.

Mapillary has just released a desktop application for uploading large amounts of street-level imagery, which can then be used for editing OpenStreetMap. It is currently available for Mac and Windows. Learn more on the Mapillary blog.

Adam Rousell from the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology reports that the latest version 4.7.2. of openrouteservice also includes information about access restrictions when your route takes you over roads that are marked in OSM as restricted (e.g. destination only roads, private roads etc.).

Reddit user nanothrowaway airs a lot of grouses about OsmAnd’s OSM Map Creator. Various redditors tried to explain why the data is kept in memory for efficiency reasons, but the OP maintained that it’s the use of Java which is the problem.

Releases

MyOSMatic, a MapOSMatic instance at osm-baustelle.de, has upgraded the front end from Bootstrap v3 to v4.

Did you know …

… you can use Traveltime Platform to create isochrones in several countries? One can create travel time polygons on a map, for example, “how far can I reach within 30 minutes by car/bicycle/public transport from my current location?”

OSM in the media

The German weekly newspaper Die Zeit uses OSM data to visualise the distribution of various sports (from cricket to football) worldwide (automatic translation).

Other “geo” things

Matt Caywood, of Washington(DC)-based firm TransitScreen, announced the launch of OpenMobilityData – “the OpenStreetMap of transit” – a joint venture with non-profit MobilityData. The goal is an open data platform for transit and mobility data. The data have been seeded from TransitFeeds, which has been acquired by the new venture.

The Hindu, the second most circulated English-language newspaper in India, published an article about OSM, the OSM community in India and the use of OSM in the humanitarian sector.

The BBC World Service’s Business Daily programme aired an episode (select the download link on that page) devoted to the poor availability of modern up-to-date maps across Africa. This is the third episode titled “Africa’s Missing Maps” and mainly features businesses such as TomTom and the Ordnance Survey.

Maxor Technologies, DigitalGlobe’s parent company, announced that the WorldView-4 Earth observation satellite has suffered a defect in its attitude correction system. Due to this loss of a stability axis, the satellite can no longer be used for image acquisition. WorldView-4 was launched in November 2016, making it the youngest satellite in the DigitalGlobe fleet. SpaceflightNow reports that the planned lifetime was 10 to 12 years.

Mapping

“A fool with a tool…” (… is still a fool) is probably not the right subject line if you want to address an issue on an international mailing list, even if you encounter an OSM element where name spacing is taken to an extreme level:

Disputed boundaries are a sensitive issue, and so are proposals as to how to map them. John Paris announced version 1.6 of his proposal for mapping disputed boundaries in OSM and requests feedback.

Konrad Lischka suggested extending the tag amenity=kindergarten with operator=, operator:type=charitable and organisation= to properly tag kindergartens that are operated as independent charitable entities.

Following the recent approval of the new keyinterval= for tagging the time between departures at any given stop (see Headway on Wikipedia), Leif Rasmussen continues with the next step and suggests the key departures= for adding the departure time for a given interval.

Minh Nguyen reports about his mapping of Oldenburg (Indiana), a city where street signs are in German.

In some countries the number 13 is considered as unlucky. In these countries the 13th floor is often omitted in multi-level buildings. The mapper ‘This Is A Display Name Desu’ asks how to deal with it when mapping building levels.

Community

A community representative from the Thai community will meet with the mapping lead from Grab to discuss recent quality issues caused by Grab’s activity. Mishari Muqbil is helping to prepare for the meeting and asks for input from the wider community on what topics should be addressed during the meeting.

“What use is OpenStreetMap?” John Whelan was asked by an employee of a municipal government. How would you have responded and where would you refer them to find further information? The answers to his question might help you too.

The interpretation of population limits in the OSM wiki for choosing the correct value for a place= tag led to a dispute between mappers in Turkmenistan. The issue is that the importance of a settlement in some countries is not reflected in the same way by the population number as it is in Western Europe for example. Joseph Eisenberg wrote a good summary of how to distinguish between the place-values without using hard population limits. Kevin Kenny reports on a similar discussion in the US and points to the outcome.

David Garcia, a cartographer, wrote an article on medium.com about why he is committed to the commons of cartography. As he lays out in the article, his turning point was his humanitarian contribution to OSM after the devastating cyclone Haiyan.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

We want to repeat a tweet from the OSM Operations Team: “Thank you to @AssoGrifon 🇫🇷 and @iwayAG 🇨🇭 for offering us Tile CDN servers today. Both now up & already serving traffic.”

The German company Alpha9 Marketing Gmbh Co KG with its brand auskunft.de joined the OpenStreetMap Foundation as a Bronze Corporate Member.

Events

The 4th GeoPython Conference will take place on June 24-26, 2019 in Basel/Muttenz, Switzerland. The topics range from Python in general, geospatial webservices and geovisualisation to indoor mapping and modelling

Education

Yongyang Xu, Zhong Xie and Liang Wu from the Faculty of Information Engineering, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China, have analysed the road network in OSM and found out that the data in OSM is highly detailed and complex but also includes many duplicate lines which degrade the efficiency and increase the difficulty of extracting multilane roads. The team suggested a machine‐learning‐based approach to predicted multilane roads. Unfortunately the study is behind a paywall, hence, it could not be confirmed whether the research area has indeed many duplicate roads or if it is a misconception about OSM’s data model.

Maps

Paul Norman offers pre-rendered OSM carto tiles at low zoom levels for download. The files that are available for the zoom levels 0 to 6, 8, 9 or 10 could be useful, if you need a world map without high zoom levels and don’t want to set up a database server.

Juminet has created(automatic translation) an OSM map of the Ardennes region. He describes a clever method to determine orientation for markers, and shows the special attention his map gives to Christmas trees.

Software

Releases

Version 2.12.2 of the iD editor has recently been released. The new version allows a preset to control the “add field” dropdown, improves usability and performance, fixes a lot of bugs, adds localisation to label/description pulled from Wikidata, and further improves the presets.

Did you know …

… that Austria’s building coverage in OSM has reached 85 percent? That’s an increase of 21% compared with the beginning of 2016. Even the least-mapped municipalities exceed 50 percent coverage.

… Geofabrik’s tile calculator, that returns the number and size of tiles in a given bounding box.

Other “geo” things

The theory that the geography of a country determines its development is not new. However, Lionel Page disagrees and points to a road map of the border area between the neighbouring countries Finland and Russia, that shows significant differences although they are very close to each other geographically. To the critics that said one example does not falsify a theory, Lionel responded by naming similar examples in North/South Korea, Austria and Czechia (the Czech Republic), USA and Mexico.

The company Here, formerly known as Navteq and Nokia Maps, launched an app for planning and sharing rides called SoMo (derived from “social mobility”). The app aims to combine all public, private and personal transport offerings in a single system and adds social functions to share rides between personal contacts.